U.S. oligarchy

Chart of the Day – Wall Street vs. Main Street

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Wall Street is counting its winnings from seven years of easy money.

The results represent a clear victory for Wall Street over Main Street, according to the team of Michael Hartnett, BofA’s chief investment strategist.

“Zero rates and asset purchases of central banks have, thus far, proved much more favorable to Wall Street, capitalists, shadow banks, ‘unicorns,’ and so on than it has for Main Street, workers, savers, banks and the jobs market,” the BofA team wrote.

– From the post: Bank of America Admits – Central Bank Policy Enriched Wall Street While “Steamrolling” Main Street

When I first started this website several years ago, part of my mission was to convince as many people as possible that we all have a common adversary, the U.S. status quo. Back then, the public was still largely confused. Still in financial shock from the crisis, many Americans hung onto hope that if they just kept their heads down and worked hard things would get better. Well they didn’t get better, and they aren’t going to.

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More Corporate Cronyism and Shadiness Revealed in Newly Released Obamatrade Report

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The good news is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently admitted that the TPP, aka Obamatrade, has very little chance of passing Congress before next year’s Presidential election. The bad news is the main reason for this is because the RINOs in charge don’t think it represents enough of a giveaway to multi-national mega corporations.

All that aside, David Dayen just published a very valuable piece detailing the findings of a 121-page report critiquing the TPP by the Labor Advisory Committee.

Here’s more from Naked Capitalism:

The U.S. Trade Representative’s Office has been maligned for its network of Trade Advisory Committees, allegedly “independent” counsel for trade agreements. The Washington Post did the best work on the Advisory Committees back in February of last year, showing that 85 percent of the cleared advisors (meaning cleared to read the text of trade agreements as they are being negotiated) either worked directly for private industries or their trade groups.

But there’s another, more obscure group called the Labor Advisory Committee. Its 19 members are all the heads of major labor unions (Clayola Brown, president of the A. Phillip Randolph Institute, I guess technically isn’t, but that organization is a constituency group of the AFL-CIO). And like all Advisory Committees, they are required by law to write a report to Congress expressing their opinions about any finalized trade agreement. That means we now have this 121-page document, giving labor’s full argument against the TPP, from the people who have been following it from the inside for several years.

It gets off to quite a start in the first words of the executive summary:

On behalf of the millions of working people we represent, we believe that the TPP is unbalanced in its provisions, skewing benefits to economic elites while leaving workers to bear the brunt of the TPP’s downside. The TPP is likely to harm the U.S. economy, cost jobs, and lower wages.

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America’s Road to Serfdom – 51% of Home Renters Are Over 40 Years Old

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Today’s story from the Associated Press perfectly illustrates how millions of Americans were reduced to neo-feudal serfs by the financial crisis, and how those who ruined the economy profited handsomely from the process.

While popular perception holds that debt-ridden, broke millennials are the ones driving the rental market, the truth is far more nuanced. As the AP reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The majority of U.S. renters are now older than 40, a fundamental shift over the past decade that reflects the lasting damage of the housing crash and an aging population.

This finding in a report released Wednesday by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies overturns the assumption that the rental boom is only the result of twenty-somethings flocking to hip urban centers. Single-family houses are a growing share of rentals. And affordability problems are mounting as rents rise faster than wages, while apartment construction increasingly targets tenants with six-figure incomes.

Nearly 51 percent of renters have celebrated their 40th birthday, according to the report’s analysis of Census Bureau data. That amounts to 22.4 million households. 

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American Upper Middle Class Share of Wealth is Worse than Every Country Besides Russia and Indonesia

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Screen Shot 2014-11-06 at 11.53.35 AMOne of Liberty Blitzkrieg’s most popular posts in 2013 was titled: How Does America’s Middle Class Rank Globally? #27. Here’s an excerpt:

We are number 1 right? USA! USA! No one can beat our wealth creation machine, our economic dynamism, our level playing field and our bastions of higher education. We have a middle class that is the envy of the world, right?

Well, like so much of the “American dream” we have been force fed for a generation or more, this perception is not based in reality whatsoever. Sure it may have been the case for a couple of decades immediately after World War 2. Before the military-industrial-Wall Street complex fully took over the political process, but it certainly isn’t true any longer. Myths die hard and this one is particularly pernicious because it prevents people from changing things.

The data in that article was based on a comprehensive study published by Credit Suisse titled Global Wealth Data Book. Well, the 2014 version is now out, and the results are not pretty.

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